Beekeeping
Practical Action
to use an old knife for this job, but knife blades tend to be too flexible and give insufficient
leverage.
Beehives
A beehive is any container provided for
honey bees to nest in. The idea is to
encourage the bees to build their nest in
such a way that it is easy for the
beekeeper to manage and exploit them.
Traditional hives
These are made from whatever materials
(a)
are available locally: typically hollowed-
out logs, bark formed into a cylinder, clay
pots, woven grass, or cane. They are used
to encourage bees to nest in a site that is
accessible by the beekeeper.
The bees build their nest inside the
container, just as they would build it
Movable frames can be spun in a radial (a) or tangential (b)
extractor Both of these can be adapted to take comb from the top
bar hives by making wire mesh cages that sit where the frames
normally would A third option (not shown) is for flat, round mesh
trays that stack inside the cylinder.
in a naturally occurring cavity. Eventually the
beekeeper plunders the nest to obtain crops of
honey and beeswax. Bees may or may not be
killed during this process, depending on the skill
of the beekeeper. If the colony is destroyed, the
hive will remain empty for a while. If there are
plenty of honey bee colonies in the area, then
eventually a swarm may settle in the empty hive
and start building a new nest. Traditional
(b)
beekeepers often own 200 hives, and expect
only a proportion of these to be occupied by bees
at any time.
Figure 3: Honey extractors
All the requirements for traditional beekeepers will be available locally, but beekeepers can be
helped by the provision of protective clothing, smokers, and containers for the honey, and with
help in locating markets for their products.
Movable frame hives
These are the hives used in industrialised countries and in some countries in the South where
beekeeping is a major industry, such as Mexico and Brazil. The objective of movable-frame hive
beekeeping is to obtain the maximum honey crop, season after season, with the least disruption
of the colony. These rectangular wooden or plastic frames have two major advantages:
They allow easy inspection and manipulation of colonies.
They allow very efficient honey harvesting because the honeycombs, within their frames, can
be emptied of honey and then returned to the hive.
Frame hives must be constructed with precision. Frames are contained within boxes and each
hive consists of a number of boxes placed on top of each other. Often a 'queen excluder', a metal
grid with holes that allows only the smaller worker bees to pass through, is used to isolate the
brood in the bottom-most boxes. The rest of the boxes will contain only honey.
Intermediate technology hives
Intermediate technology hives combine the advantages of frame hives with low cost and the
ability to manufacture locally. The hive consists of a container with a series of 'top bars', on
which the bees are encouraged to build their combs. These top bars then allow individual combs
to be lifted from the hive by the beekeeper. The containers for the hives may, like traditional
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